I wrote a review about The Next Digital Scholar collection over at Middleweb. It’s a book that has a lot of information packed tight into it, with lots of great chapters designed to help teachers think about the intersections of learning and technology.
Peace (in the pages),
Kevin
My latest post over at Middleweb is about using poetry to bring my students on a listening field trip across the United States. The vehicle is their imagination.
Peace (in poems),
Kevin
My latest post at my blog over at Middleweb is a look at a wonderful collection of graphic stories, with connections across science, history, media and more. The collection is called Reading with Pictures and is curated for classrooms.
Peace (in the share),
Kevin
(This is a Slice of Life post, as facilitated by Two Writing Teachers. Lots of educators are writing about the small moments of their days. You write, too.)
I recently wrote a piece for my Working Draft blog over at Middleweb about using a fun, new way to get my students to write stories. Storyteller Cards. They’re pretty nifty and strange, and perfect for sparking interest from my young writers. At the time, I had just introduced the cards to some students, and asked them for suggestions.
Each card has information: a character in a setting, with an object, doing something. Other bits of information along the edges of the cards include a mood, a season, a letter and a playing card suit/number.
This is an image from the Storyteller Card site: An Anatomy of a Card.
Yesterday, I pulled out the deck of cards for all four of my classes and we created a story-writing game of sorts that engaged my sixth graders so much, they were leaving the class asking when we could write again.
This is how we played:
Ideally, the third step of this “game” would have been to trade your card with someone next to you, but we never got there. This activity engaged my students and also provided a nice creative break from our Parts of Speech unit and open response prep work that we are doing as we eye our state tests on the horizon.
My co-teacher, seeing the engagement of our writers, made the astute observation:
What if the state test was all about this kind of writing?
What if? As if.
Peace (in the cards),
Kevin
My latest post at Middleweb comes on the heels of completing a course on ELL Immersion. Our state now requires the sheltered immersion course as a requirement for re-certification. It was a bear of a course, and I share out Nine Lessons Learned.
Peace (for all students),
Kevin
My latest blog post over at Middleweb is about the feeling that there is always so much more to learn about the teaching of writing, and how I am inspired by an urban school where I am facilitating a year-long professional development inquiry around writing in the content areas.
Peace (in the share),
Kevin
My latest post at my Working Draft blog at MiddleWeb is a look at play, with Kevin Cordi’s new book as my guide. Come check out the post and think about how you play with stories in your classroom.
Peace (in the share),
Kevin
For everyone who is in all of my various online networks and communities and adventures, I thank you. Here is a song, with some animated words, as my humble thanks for all the inspiration and support you give me throughout the year as I write and explore and learn.
Peace (with words on the wall),
Kevin
Over at by Working Draft blog at Middleweb, I wrote about a project called The Peaceful Imaginary Land Brochure Project as part of a way to talk to my students about our school’s Peacebuilder’s Pledge in a different way (beyond mouthing the words as a school every morning.)
I did not share the above graphic there, but I had worked on this image as I was thinking through all of the literacy points with the project as a way to document the student learning. As I added more and more elements, I realized just how expansive this one project can be, and on how many points of writing, reading, listening and speaking it hits.
Peace (in the lands),
Kevin
At my Working Draft blog over at MiddleWeb, my latest post is about our whitewater rafting trip and the idea of seeing our students in a very different environment (literally/figuratively) when we take them outside of our traditional classroom setting.
Peace (in the current),
Kevin